Dear Mystery Guy (Magnolia Sisters Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Luca's phone rang after ten in the morning. He looked at it hazily.
Josephine.
He had woken up earlier and went to the gym, showered and then crawled back into bed. He was exhausted.

"Hello," he answered groggily.

"I am at your door," Josephine said impatiently. "I told you you should have given me a key."

Luca got up. He had only hauled on a pair of boxers after showering that morning. He pulled on a track bottom, almost stumbling in his bleary-eyed haste to get one foot into the right leg.

"Coming. Coming." He staggered to the door and opened it, As usual Josephine smelled good and looked good. She was dressed in a pristine white pant suit.

"Give me a few more minutes." He yawned and headed back to his room. "I promise I will be perfect fiancé material after that."

Josephine grinned. "Sure you don't want me to join you?"

Luca looked back at her and smiled. "In two weeks I won't say no."

"Okay. I'll just make us brunch." Josephine grinned. "When you get up I will demonstrate my culinary skills."

Luca nodded sleepily and walked toward the bedroom upstairs.

She headed to the kitchen. She hadn't pretended to be domesticated in years. Why had she promised Luca to make brunch? She watched his retreating back as he headed up the stairs.

For the first time since she could remember she actually loved someone. Not just for their money or what they could give her. What she felt for Luca was the real deal.

She looked around his spotless kitchen and at all the shiny appliances and sat down on a bar stool with a sigh.

She didn't know where to start. Cooking was never her favorite thing to do. She was known for her bedroom prowess, something Luca did not know about yet, but she was anticipating showing him very soon.

She cupped her head in her hands. She had tried to dress down today in white slacks and a white shirt, and she had pulled back her hair in a high ponytail. This was as far as she did casual.

She looked at her reflection in the kitchen mirror. Dressing in all white and cooking was not a good combination in her opinion.

She capitulated and called her housekeeper, Jan. She wanted to impress Luca. Who could blame her?

He wouldn't know that she didn't do the meal anyway, because anywhere she went Jan went with her.

Jan had been her companion through thick and thin, even through the really thin years of her late teens and early twenties. Back then they were not boss and employee.

Jan was her third cousin from her father's side of the family, and she had gone through a rough time. Josephine had rescued her and since then she had been her housekeeper.

Josephine called Jan and waited for her to answer the phone.

"This is a four one one." Josephine chuckled. "I promised Luca I would make him brunch. Help me out."

"Okay," Jan said grumpily. "I was planning to go to Fiona's church. It's Good Friday. They do this whole reenactment of Jesus' death and stuff."

Josephine snorted. "Whatever. Just do the food before you go. Make it nice."

"Ungodly." Jan guffawed. "Besides, he'll know that you can't cook and if I make this brunch nice he'll expect you to cook for him all the time."

"You have a point." Josephine bit her lip. "Okay, make it simple. Something that I can do if I put my mind to it, and bring it over in an hour. He's sleeping."

"You mean boil water?" Jan snorted in glee. "That's the only thing you can do in the kitchen."

"I hate it when you laugh at my expense." Josephine chuckled with her. "I feel as if Luca is not all here with me, you know. I don't know what happened. We were going well and then suddenly there is a little cold air where there used to be warmth. You get what I mean?"

"And you think a meal will fix that?" Jan laughed again. "Okay, let me get to it."

She hung up the phone and Josephine sat down, drumming her hands on the counter and then her eyes encountered a package with a bright green marker on the front.

She walked over to the package and picked it up. It felt like a book. How odd. Who would be sending Luca a book?

The writing on the front of the package was done in a flourish. The Luca and the Lawson had a curling L and it was finished off with a heart at the end of the Lawson.

What? How juvenile!

Josephine looked at the address. It had been mailed to him at his parents' house. Maybe it was one of his patients. Maybe even a child. They were usually grateful when Luca fixed them up, but to send him a book?

She was itching to see what type of book was it. It was oddly shaped. Maybe it was a picture book or one of those large medical books.

She put down the package and walked toward the living room. When she moved in she would have the whole place overhauled. She hated the simple decor. Luca had allowed Yasmin to decorate for him, and the result was amateurish in her opinion.

She looked around
.
Accent walls were so yesterday. She sat in one of the overstuffed settees and plotted what she would get rid of and what she would do with the place.

First of all, her picture would be front and center, where Luca or Yasmin had the poor taste to put a black and white picture of a dog.

Luca had told her that the dog had been his friend and companion and had died shortly before he met her.

She hated dogs and she equally hated pictures of them. She would have to arrange for this particular picture to be destroyed, and she was going to strongly dissuade Luca from getting any dogs in the future.

She remembered a dog from her past that she had hated as well. Oh, how she had hated that furry creature, and to be fair the dog had hated her too. She had been happy when he died.

She turned on the stereo and smooth jazz instrumental came on. She stretched out her legs in the settee and continued plotting how she would redecorate the place. The settees she would probably keep. They were comfortable.

*****

"This is good, Jose," Luca said two hours later. "I didn't know you were such a good cook, and where on earth did you get these ingredients? I completely forgot to buy bread."

Josephine smiled slightly. She was going to get back at Jan. She really was.

Jan had sent over the food in hot plates and arranged them professionally, knowing that Jose would have no idea how to do it.

She had sent over farmer's omelet and vanilla French toast, panini with Portobello mushrooms and fresh mozzarella. But it was her fault; she hadn't planned the whole thing through properly before she volunteered to cook, and now she had to confess to Luca that she had gotten it done somewhere else.

She grabbed a glass of orange juice. "I did set the table. Cheers."

Luca looked at her and smiled. "So who did it?"

"My housekeeper. Jan. I have to confess that I can't cook."

"Not at all?" Luca leaned back in his chair.

"Nope." Josephine shook her head. "It isn't a crime, you know? And I have Jan."

Luca chuckled. "With the two of us so busy, I guess Jan will come in handy. And I just learned to cook properly the other day. It has proven to be fun so far."

"Maybe I will learn some day." Josephine said, relieved that he wasn't mad at her for her attempted duplicity.

"So tell me." Luca played with the stem of the glass in front of him. "Were you married before?"

Josephine inhaled and then exhaled rapidly. "Yes. It has not been a big secret. Just like you were married before."

"There are so many things I don't know about you." Luca sighed. "Maybe we should push down the wedding and give ourselves some time for more days like this…get to know each other better. We sort of rushed into this, don't you think?"

Josephine shook her head. "No Luca. I love you and I want to marry you. What you don't know about me can be written on a stamp head. Seriously. My life is an open book."

"Really?" Luca looked into her expressive eyes, and he wondered what Nick was talking about. Josephine was not hard.

"Yes. Really." Josephine laughed. "I was born in the slums of downtown Kingston, but I already told you that."

"You did," Luca said. "Then you migrated to England when you were a teen."

"That's right." Josephine sipped some juice. "My father sent for me, my mother, my and little sister. It took a while for me to adjust. We lived on a counsel estate for a while. I got into some bad company there but was rescued quickly by a lawyer who had some Jamaican roots."

"That I did not know about," Luca said, smiling. "You don't look like somebody who would get into bad company."

"I married the lawyer. It was my first marriage." Josephine shrugged. "It was a mismatch from the get-go. He was a widower, far older than me, and it just did not work out. Then I left the UK. Came to Jamaica after the divorce. Got married to Ray Fearon. You must have heard of him."

"Just recently." Luca was no longer relaxed. He had loads of questions but he didn't want to ask Josephine as if she was in some sort of inquisition. Not when she was volunteering information so freely. Why hadn't they talked about this before? He was going to be husband number three, and he was just finding out about it two weeks before they tied the knot? He thought he was going to be her first husband!

"Well, Ray died and made me a merry widow and here I am," Josephine said, quite relaxed, unaware of his mounting tension.

"Tell me about the first husband," Luca asked tensely. "Is he still alive?"

"Yes." Josephine sighed. "Yes, he is. There is nothing to tell, really. I was married to him for two years. I got married at the ridiculously young age of nineteen. I..."

Luca's phone rang, cutting into Josephine's conversation, and he got up to get it. He had put it on the counter beside the package that he had had yet to open.

He answered the phone impatiently. "Hello."

"Hello, Doctor Lawson." It was one of the nurses who was on emergency duty at the practice. "You told me to call you if there was any change in the patient."

"Yes," Luca said tersely.

"Her fingers started twitching. Involuntary ticks. Is that relevant?"

"Yes." Luca looked over at Josephine in the breakfast nook. She was watching him alertly, as if she had just picked up that he was not as relaxed as she was about her recent revelations.

He needed to think. He was a mass of mixed emotions, and he didn't know what to think. Going to Sunshine Medical to check on Della would be a good excuse to process what Jose told him.

He clutched the phone closer to his ear. "Yes it is, nurse. I'll just come by and give her a check over."

He hung up the phone and drummed his finger on the package. "I am going by the clinic--that patient Othneil mowed down is showing signs of life."

"Oh goodness. I am happy to hear that." Josephine pouted, "But that means you'll be gone for a while."

"Just a short time," Luca said. He didn't know if he was prepared to hear how little he knew Josephine.

"What's that package?" Josephine asked.

"I don't know." Luca looked down at it. "Someone sent it to my parents’ house. Obviously it's somebody who doesn't know my new address." He picked up the package and tore it open.

"It's a book." He opened it and the first lines were:
Dear Mystery Guy.

He flipped through the pages. There was a lot of writing in there. He paused when he saw that in the middle of the book there was an entry stating
Dear Luca, today I saw you at the supermarket again.

He looked at Josephine incredulously. "It seems as if I have a stalker."

"Let me see," Josephine said curiously.

"Later." Luca clutched it to him. "I want to look at it closely first. Are you going to be okay here while I'm gone?"

"No." Josephine shook her head. "I am going home. Call me when you get back."